I don’t know if you tweet — No! Don’t turn over, I’m not going to get all techie. I do not tweet, but my husband does, voluminously. I won’t betray his rather strange handle and avatar. Those are technical terms, but they are not the main point I want to make now. The handle is the username, such as @DotWordsworth. That example is not me, but one of the four Twitter accounts apparently written by Dorothy Wordsworth. The one using my name declares in her online profile ‘My bowels very bad.’ Have I ever written that here? No.
The avatar is the little picture of the user that appears at the top of each account and with every tweet. Everyone knows an avatar derives from Hindu mythology. The word was introduced into English in 1784 by that clever man William Jones (who at the age of 18 learnt Arabic at Oxford with the aid of a Syrian who helped him translate The Arabian Nights back into the original).
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